by Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

by Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

You can tell American Idol wants this season to belong to a girl - and it does.

Her name is Nicki Minaj.

As the weeks go by, that could change. The focus on this long-running Fox singing contest could eventually shift to the contestants, as it should, and in particular, to a female contestant, as the show so clearly, fervently hopes. (You can be forgiven for taking Randy Jackson's early announcement Tuesday that this is "a girl's season to lose" as more of a prompt than an opinion.)

It's even possible that the show's other two judging newcomers, Mariah Carey and Keith Urban, will do something to take the spotlight away from Minaj's odd, ever-shifting mix of honesty and artifice. But having gone through weeks of taped programs and now, finally, the first live show Tuesday, how likely does that really seem?

Then again, how likely did it seem before the season started that Minaj would be the breakout? She's not as familiar with Idol's workings as Jackson or as well-known as Urban or Carey, which is one reason some viewed those early reports of a Carey/Minaj feud as an attention-getting stunt. Where Urban seems effortlessly at ease, and Carey seems to be happily ensconced in her own universe, Minaj can look stiff and uncomfortable when she's not speaking, like an actor preparing for a performance.

And then she speaks, and she's riveting. Minaj blends Paula Abdul's mothering, Stephen Tyler's sometimes inappropriate quirkiness and - at her best - Simon Cowell's directness into a judging style that is all her own and almost always unexpected. One minute she's commenting on a singer's breasts or calling another one her "wife"; the next, she's being as precise, insightful and constructive as any Idol judge has ever been.

She sometimes lets her mannerisms (the eye rolling, the accents, the obsessions) run away with her. But she's surprising, and so far, she's the only person on Idol who is.

No one, of course, was expecting big surprises from Jackson, who is so settled in his role, he speaks as if he's quoting from some Randy Jackson Phrasebook. He's more critical than he once was, more willing to call something a "mess." But those critiques are invariably peppered with Jackson-isms (dawg, yo, pitchy) and built around a favorite trope.

By Tuesday's second singer, he'd already trotted out the familiar "safe song choice" without enough "moments"; by the end of the night, he had moved on to the dreaded "in it to win it." Should you ever be called upon to create your own catchphrase, choose one that's not insipid.

Stationed at the end of the table, Urban is handsome, likable and reliably charming, the kind of man who can praise a teenage girl's looks without coming across as creepy. He's nice, but on this show, nice is not enough. While he'll occasionally say something pointed (when he told a singer not to smile during a sad song, thousand of Idol viewers surely cheered), he generally prefers to discuss song choices, the mark of a judge who is either too easily pleased, or too eager to please.

At the other end, physically separated from Minaj by Jackson, is Carey, spouting the same sort of bland encouragements and niceties she's probably told a thousand fans while signing autographs. When the camera catches Carey during a performance, you can tell whether she's enjoying it. When she speaks, however, anything resembling an actual opinion gets lost in a tangled maze of words and phrases that have little relationship to the performance or each other. Somewhere an English professor is going out of his mind trying to diagram one of her sentences.

Those tuning in expecting fireworks between Carey and Minaj have no doubt been disappointed, as they studiously ignore each other. (Tuesday, at least, Minaj dropped the childish act of keeping her back turned toward her female co-worker.) Carey will sometimes make an oblique, derogatory reference to something Minaj has said, but since everything Carey says is oblique, the insults are easy to miss.

Unfortunately for Fox, while chilly distance is better than open warfare, it makes for a cold, uncomfortable evening, with the women too often staring straight ahead and the men trying too desperately to connect. They don't have to like each other. (Do you like everyone you work with?) They don't even have to pretend to like each other. But they do need to find some way to interact in a mature, civil fashion.

If they don't, Idol is going to remain a one-woman show. And as fascinating as that woman may be, she hasn't been enough to stop the show's ratings slide.

It's time for one of the judges, or better yet, one of the contestants, to give her some help.